Wednesday, 27 January 2016

Hello everyone, and welcome to another week on the Chocolate Baroque Challenge Blog. This week, we are announcing the winner of Challenge Eighteen. The winner of our £15 prize to spend at Chocolate Baroque is Val, whose card was drawn by Random.org as the overall winner. Congratulations Val, we hope that you enjoy your prize.

Please email Lesley on lesley@chocolatebaroque.com so that she can organise your voucher.

Our Top Three this month have been chosen by the Design Team who have had a hard time choosing just three entries from such a wonderful selection. The Top Three in no particular order are:

Congratulations ladies, you can display the Top Three badge on your blog. Details of how to obtain the badge can be found on the FAQ tab at the top of the page. Well done to everyone who entered, and we hope that you will enter the current challenge. You can find the details here.

We have some more Design Team inspiration for you this week. Asha has created a beautiful watercolour scene for you:

Dominike has created a cloth bag and pocket. The soft colours on the pocket combined with the stamps that she has used are reminiscent of a Monet painting:

Here is the bag:

Julie has created a pretty card using one of the individual bird stamps set against a floral background:

Thank you so much girls for your lovely projects, we hope that they will inspire you to create something yourselves for the current challenge.

We will be back next week with more projects from the Design Team, but until then, we look forward to seeing your entries. If you have any questions and cannot find the answers on the blog pages, please send us a private message using the contact form located at the very end of this post; you will see it after the comments section.

Wednesday, 20 January 2016

Hello everyone, and welcome to a brand new challenge on the Chocolate Baroque Challenge Blog. Thank you so much for your support and comments throughout the month, we really appreciate your visits to the blog, and love reading what you have to say.

We will be announcing the winner of Challenge Eighteen next week, so if you entered a project last month, please be sure to check the announcement to see if you are the winner of our prize.

As a reminder to those of you who have visited our blog before, and for anyone who is new to the blog, our challenges are monthly, based on an inspirational photo and a colour swatch. A new challenge is launched on the third Wednesday of every month. You can use any medium to create your project; inks, paints, pens, pencils, etc., as long as you stick to the colours from the colour swatch in your project.

We are offering a monthly prize of £15 to spend on Chocolate Baroque stamps to one lucky winner, who will be selected by Random.org from all of the entrants who have used Chocolate Baroque stamps currently available from the website. We welcome entries incorporating other stamps and images, but they will not be eligible for the prize. All entrants will have the chance to be selected as one of our Top Three and can then display our 'I made the Top Three at Chocolate Baroque' badge on their blog.

The challenge colours this month are taken from a much softer selection than last month, and we are using a lovely piece of artwork created by Lesley for your inspiration. The Design Team girls have created some beautiful designs that we will be sharing with you over the coming weeks. Here is the colour swatch for the new challenge:

The challenge will close at 12.00 p.m. on Tuesday 16th February 2016, and the winner will be announced on Wednesday 24th February 2016. Here are some inspirational projects from the Design Team for you:

Claire has created a pretty card using some of our bird stamps, with matching embellishments:

Debbie has been busy creating three cards for your inspiration, a Christmas card, showing that pastels can work all year round, and two pretty floral cards, thank you Debbie!

Thank you so much girls for your inspiration, such a gorgeous selection of projects using the challenge colours. We hope that they will inspire you to rummage through your stash and join in the creativity with us. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact our challenge blog team. You can get in touch by sending us a private message. Details are at the end of this blog post, below the comments section.

We hope that you enjoy this new challenge, and look forward to seeing your projects.

Wednesday, 13 January 2016

Hello everyone, and welcome to our final week of the current challenge on the Chocolate Baroque Challenge Blog. Thank you for your lovely comments throughout the month, we really appreciate your support, and love reading what you have to say.

This week, we are taking a look at some of the entries that we have received for the current challenge, and showcasing just a few of them on the blog. We know that some of you have found this particular colour swatch a little more difficult than some of the other combinations, but you have created some really fabulous projects. Well done for stepping outside your comfort zone! Here are a few projects that we would like to mention:

Lesley's CAS Christmas card is lovely in its simplicity, but this clean look takes a lot of practice to get right!:

Felicie's layered card offers a complete contrast in style, but is so pretty in this unusual colour combination:

An email entry from Val is next, with a fabulous background and white highlights lifting the flowers:

Joan's simple stamping and masking creates this lovely card suitable for all sorts of occasions:

These cards display such a great range of styles and ideas, so thank you ladies, for your creativity!

Thank you to everyone who entered the challenge this month, and we hope to see lots more entries from you before the challenge deadline next week. There is still plenty of time to enter, and you can find the link in this post. Remember, you stand a chance of winning a £15 voucher, details of which can be found on the How it Works tab at the top of the page. We will be back next week with a brand new challenge. If you have any questions and cannot find the answers on the blog, please send us a private message using the contact form located at the very end of this post; you will see it after the comments section.

Wednesday, 6 January 2016

Hello everyone, and welcome to another week on the Chocolate Baroque Challenge Blog. Firstly, we would like to wish you all a very Happy New Year, and that you will have a year filled with exciting crafting possibilities. We hope that we will play a part with providing a bit of inspiration on the blog with our colour swatches, and hope that you will play along with us each month, sharing in the creative fun. If you would like to enter our current challenge, you can add your project to the link in this post.

We have a free download from Lesley for you this week, and she has created a beautiful design for you to use in your projects. She has entitled this design 'Chinese Gooseberries', and it is a rich pattern, suitable for all sorts of themes, as you will hopefully see from the DT inspiration.

Please do not pass the image onto others, but send them back here to collect the freebie for themselves. To obtain your free download, please click on the image below. Once you have enlarged the image on your screen, right click the image, choose the option 'Save As', and save the image to your computer. You can now print the image onto a variety of surfaces for your crafting projects.

The Design Team have been making some projects for your inspiration using the free download. Anne has created a pretty feminine Birthday card, combining several stamp sets:

I have also created a Birthday card, but by adding black details, the overall feel is very different.

We hope that we have inspired you to use this lovely download yourself. If you do make something using one of Lesley's downloads, why not upload a picture to your blog, or our Facebook page? We would love to see what you have made.

We will be back next week with another post, but in the meantime, we look forward to seeing your entries for the challenge. Don't forget, if you have any questions, and you cannot find the answers on the blog, please send us a private message using the contact form located at the very end of this post; you will see it after the comments section.

Current Challenge

Welcome

A very warm welcome to the Chocolate Baroque Challenge Blog. We love crafting and stamping in particular and we love to share and encourage you to have a go.

We hope that you will be inspired to get your stamps inked up, make some time to play and end up with a creation you are proud to share with us all.

Please take a look around - we have tabs at the top that give you lots of information about how our challenges work and if you have any questions at all, please use the Contact page to get in touch and one of the team will get back to you.